96 BIG GAME SHOOTING 
us into life, unheard, unseen before. I rode up to the edge, 
it was a mass of struggling buffaloes jammed together.. The 
outside ones, startled by the shot, and having got sight of our 
party, bore back upon the main body ; hoof and horn, horn 
and hoof, rattled one against another, and for some distance 
I rode parallel with a heaving stream of wild life. I cannot 
pretend with any accuracy to guess their numbers, but there 
must have been thousands, for they were packed together like 
the pictures of American bison, and any number of ‘ braves’ 
might have walked over their backs, so far as I could see, for 
any distance. In the moonlight, I could only, to be sure, 
make out my side of this seething river. 
Two marches from the junction of the Mariqué we found 
elephants in such large herds that we halted a week or ten 
days, and the ivory as it was brought in was piled up under my 
waggon. Once whilst here, after a long day’s tracking, the 
night caught us and we had to lie out. We found water, but 
had no food—-for you never shoot on elephant spoor for fear 
of disturbing your game, or losing your men, who settle down 
like vultures to eat. Kafirs hunt best hungry. It was a bitterly 
cold night, and how the men without clothes got through it I 
don’t know. I had no extra covering, it is true, save my saddle- 
cloth, a square of blanket 3 feet by 3 ; but we made a large fire, 
and lay all round it like the spokes of a wheel, and I don’t re- 
member feeling much inconvenience, though I was a little stiff 
in the morning, for the fire had burnt low, and the ground, except 
where we had lain, was white with frost. One of the men had 
kindly roused me about midnight, with an invitation to partake 
of a tortoise he had caught and was stirring tenderly in its shell 
among the warm ashes. I declined with thanks. We were all 
quite fresh and merry when the sun thawed us, and as we neared 
our waggons we heard shot after shot in the bush around, every 
now and then catching sight of a buffalo. I thought Vardon had 
turned out with the drivers for an early ‘ battue ’—very much 
against his custom, certainly—but who else could it be? The 
mystery was solved directly I reached our encampment, for on 
